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Thursday, July 13, 2017

`What Was He, and What Was He Not?'

“And
speaking of what so many critics had found to be a `philosophy of failure’ in
his poetry, he said, `I’ve always rather liked the queer, odd sticks of men,
that’s all. The fat, sleek, successful alderman isn’t interesting.’ He smiled
and, said again, `He isn’t interesting.’”

In
August 1929, Winfield Townley Scott (1910-1968) went on pilgrimage to the
MacDowell Colony to meet Edwin Arlington Robinson. Scott was nineteen, an
undergraduate at Brown, and worshipful. He brought with him five of Robinson’s books,
hoping the poet would autograph them. He also brought “a largely ecstatic
essay” he had written about Robinson for publication that fall in a magazine at
Brown. He was genuinely admiring but Scott was also an ambitious operator,
busily “networking,” seeking “face time,” as some would say today. In 1956,
twenty years after Robinson’s death, Scott published a brief remembrance of their
meeting, “To See Robinson,” in New Mexico
Quarterly. Scott says he was impressed by the poet’s “great courtesy, his
modesty, his reticent but real kindness,” but one reads between the lines and
senses that Robinson, though hardly immune to praise and attention, was
humoring Scott, not wishing to offend a young man.

The
remarks quoted at the top, taken from Scott’s memoir, distill my understanding
of Robinson. He was a storyteller, not a first-person lyrical writer, and those
who are popular and prosperous left him indifferent. His people are obscure and
inarticulate. He finds his subjects among “the queer, odd sticks of men.” For
Robinson, success isn’t interesting until it fails. See “Reuben Bright,”"Mr.Flood’s Party” and "Flammonde." In that last poem, the title character is the “Prince
of Castaways,” an affable enigma. The narrator speaks for the people of Tilbury
Town:

“What
was he, when we came to sift

His
meaning, and to note the drift

Of
incommunicable ways

That
make us ponder while we praise?

Why
was it that his charm revealed

Somehow
the surface of a shield?

What
was it that we never caught?

What
was he, and what was he not?”

One
could write a paper on Robinson’s use of the first-person plural. Reading him, we
are left with the conviction that we never truly fathom the being of others, and
that we, in turn, lead ineffable lives and remain mysteries to others and
ourselves. Such a man is “Richard Cory,” who ends his life without
explanation and to everyone’s surprise: “In fine, we thought that he was
everything / To make us wish that we were in his place.”

J.V.
Cunningham in “Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Brief Biography” (The CollectedEssays of J.V. Cunningham, 1976) calls the poet “a man almost
without biography,” adding: “And he knew we do not really know about others; we
do not know about him.” Psychology and the other social sciences can’t touch a
man.